There’s been overtime a history of almost hysterical leaving CP because of whatever reason as I can see since I am around and also see in the historical forum chats - sadly sometimes the “leaving CP” meant that a whole bunch of Plugins disappeared overnight.
@anon71687268, as the sole and only one, had the professionalism to set a reasonable example by giving his Plugins up to adoption (a process we also outline on our Plugin Guidelines) which then granted that the Plugins stay available.
Now however a recent “leave” made a number of plugins that are actively used disappear.
I was thinking if we could create a GIT repo (CP owned) where we “mirror” all plugins that have an entry in our plugin directory (at least all those).
The mirror would mean, that even if the origin source is removed, we still have a copy available.
I am not exactly sure how easy this is, if it requires lots of manual work, and how to keep that mirror up to date, but I think it is necessary - because those “leaving CP” events do not only hurt CP in terms of “another one who left” but if with that person also handfuls of plugins leave, then it is simply getting hilarious.
On that note, I want to point out again that we still have several developers in our plugin directory do have their plugins not on GitHub, and/or not fulfilling our guidelines!.
We need to act on that, before it comes back to byte us.
I have done whatever is in my possibilities to make that happen but to actually get it done I do not have the caps. Please either give these caps to folks who are able to take action as immediately as possible or … take action. Because “waiting” is not the solution. The directory needs to be cleaned out, and then, as mentioned in this thread, possibly mirrored for security reasons, so these “I leave CP and take half the system down with me because XY reason” can not happen again (or less).
PS
Yes, a plugin can and will overtime disappear. That is “normal”. But we do not have 50k Plugins. We have ca 90, of which ca 1/3rd are actual “fakes” (not usable, not existing or else). Thus when more than 5 plugins disappear at once, which actually where used, this is like 5000 Plugins would disappear in WP overnight, and I am speaking of plugins that would be like ACF, GF and maybe Classic Editor or Elementor, to put it in a comparison of “most used”